About

Paul Rooney is an artist/musician based in Liverpool, who makes music with words “investigating the intersections of music, myth, memory and place” (The Wire magazine). His records and installations explore the unpredictable narratives that haunt everyday objects or places, and the comically unreliable nature of narrative itself.

Records

Paul Rooney’s records have been broadcast on BBC Radios 1, 3, 6 Music, Cymru and Scotland amongst many other stations. From 1998 to 2000 he released three lo-fi experimental pop CD albums as ‘Rooney’, in which every song’s humorously disturbing anti-lyrics simply described mundane life, from looking at found photographs to doodling on a call centre shift. Despite initially being a fictional entity, the band became real enough to record a session for John Peel’s Radio 1 show in 1999 (which was re-broadcast on BBC 6 Music in 2016) and they appeared in Peel’s Festive Fifty in 1998. Paul Rooney’s next public release, under his own full name, the 2007 post-punk dub 12″ single Lucy Over Lancashire, featured an unreliable narration delivered by a satanic Lancastrian sprite.

His first full length album since 2000, Futile Exorcise – sung and spoken word post-punk experimental folk revenant songs featuring ghosts playing poker and haunting toilet seats – was released in 2017 on Owd Scrat Records. This label is a current ongoing project by Rooney and other collaborators in which all of the artists are fictional personae with often longstanding and interrelated backstories (or semi-fictional backstories in the case of one of the artists, Rooney himself, who is often implicated within his own fictions).

Exhibitions

Paul Rooney’s installations, videos and texts have been commissioned by organisations such as Film and Video Umbrella, The Drawing Room or Tate Liverpool, or have been made during artist residencies at places like DCA, Dundee; Proyecto Batiscafo, Cuba; and University of Oxford/Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. He has shown work at Tate Britain; The Arnolfini; BALTIC; Whitechapel Gallery; and ICA; and has exhibited internationally at places such as Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City); Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Seville) and at the Shanghai Biennial.